Minions with 1hp - Can anyone justify this?

[spotmarkedx]

As far as as I'm concerned, the attitude "if its not in the Rulebook, then its impossible" is just as bad as rules lawyering.

Its a roleplaying game, not a computer game, and by definition the rules should be fluid and robust enough to handle whatever the players and/or DM decide they want to do.

MrG

You know, there were three main points presented in the arguement that you quoted.
1> It is possible to have an attack that does 0 damage such as, say, the claw of a common housecat.
2> There are no housecat rules in the MM.
3> The DMG guidelines specifically discuss encounter creation rules, and talk about when to use minions. Here, we find that you should not see level 20 minions as a 1st level party (etc etc)

I will agree that #2 is weak. Just because there aren't any rules does not mean we should disregard a situation that could come up in play (though I'm honestly a bit confused as to how it would come up in play, and why there are actual attack rolls being made.)

However, points 1 & 3 were sidestepped here. Housecat can do 0 damage to the minion. The minion survives, no matter how lucky the cat is. As for the level 1 wizard vs. legion devil, this is a pretty contrived situation that is advised against if you actually read how to make an encounter. However, if it is necessary for you to figure out what happens if your PC party attacks a single Legion Devil by itself (or an isolated small group), it seems pretty easy - just reverse the rules for minionizing a monster. You'd probably be looking at some soldiers of about half the level.

Your dispute with item #2 is about the same as my support of #3. There are some situations that the game is not necessarily set up to immediatly deal with. Legion Devils are supposed to be part of a larger devil army. What happens when you catch a few of them isolated? Same thing that happens when you find yourself needing the combat stats of a housecat. The DM looks at the available tools and makes something up that is reasonable.

 

[Obryn]

Why are housecats fighting minions?

Minions are minions when interacting with the PCs in combat. Minions are not minions when they are interacting with housecats.

-O

 

[DM_Blake]

The entire point of minions is that Segal as a high level fighter would be bored fighting low level fighters to the point that low level fighters should not even be there. He still has to try, dodge attacks et all. So they get statted as minions for the purpose of fighting Segal because otherwise its impossible for Segal to have a challenging fight with a bunch of guys

If there were level 3 or 4 fighters, Segals player would leave the table because its a bunch of boring junk. Levels, hit points, attack ratings, defenses etc etc etc are all just abstractions used to entertain the players. All of these disappear when dealing with NPCs. If the players are playing and you need mooks, you stat them as minions for the players. If you want a monster that is tough all on its own, you stat it as a solo monster. If you want a monster that is tougher than the rest, but not a lot tougher, you stat it as an elite monster.

Why do we do this? Because at the fringes of to-hit rolls the game becomes too static. Its too easy when you can't be hit and its too hard when you can't hit your enemies. So if you make an enemy hard by increasing its level to the point where it stands in for 5 enemies, it would just wallop your normal party(E.G. if you were level 5 and wanted to add a monster to fight alone you would have to go to level 14 in order to reach XP parity, if you need info on why this is bad, go ahead and get a level 5 party and have them fight a Night Hag(lvl 14 Lurker) then Young Black Dragon(Lv 5 Solo Lurker) with the same resources). As such, instead of increasing levels to make a creature harder we add a solo template and now its a challenge alone. Instead of increasing levels to make a creature a bit tougher than the normal guys we add a template.

I agree from a game perspective that using minion mooks is more challenging than using low-level mooks.

But we were talking about a Steven Seagal movie. No dice, no character sheets, no game. In a movie, Seagal is paid lots of cash to show up on set each day, regardless of how bored he gets. The character he plays in the film has no say about showing up - the character shows up when Seagal shows up. So there is no boredom, or if there is, it has little bearing on the actual effort to make the movie.

So to take it back to 4e, yes, we have minions. That is one way to make mooks.

But it is not the only way.

There is nothing that says every encounter the PCs ever face must be challenging. Heck, one of the beautiful things about gaining levels is watching your character get more and more powerful. But if every fight always takes 8 rounds and leaves you bloodied and out of encounter powers, then you never get to FEEL more powerful. Sure, your level 30 fights have bigger numbers flying around than your level 1 fights, but the end result is still the same: 8 rounds of furious life-or-death action, expending all your encounter powers, ending up bloodied.

Once in a while, it might be fun to wipe the floor with a bunch of mooks. Especially if it's the same mooks that used to challenge you when you were lower level.

Remember that scene in Superman 2, when Superman gives up all his super powers to become mortal. Then he gets beat up in a bar by some big trucker guy. Then, later when he gets his power back, he goes back to the bar and trashes the trucker. Very satisfying.

It's just as satisfying when PCs get to do that.

The only way is to let them, once in a while, mop up some lowbie mooks.

Don't do it all the time. Don't bore your players. But once in a while, let them flex their new high-level muscles and actually feel powerful.

Besides, from a simulationist perspective, it's hard to imagine a bar full of bad guys, in which every one of them is vulnerable to house cats and hat pins, and not one of them (except for the boss and maybe a few of his senior henchmen) can put up a real fight. Mingle in some minions, some lowbie mooks, some mid level guys that can hit and take some hits, and a few high level guys that pose real threats.

Isn't that what a gang (or a town, or an army) would be like? Some members of any group are probably very new and green, others are highly trained, others have been part of the group for a long time and have lots of experience, still others are highly-trained AND have lots of experience.

And some of them go down with a single hit from a sword, either because you ran him through the heart or because he was a newbie and any decent would could drop him, while others take several hits and might hurt you along the way, and still others are serious threats but you gut them in one hit before they really get a chance to shine, while the best veterans in the group are a serious threat to your life and take some work to wipe them out.

 

[GoLu]

As an aside, the last housecat statblock that I saw included the following (somewhat paraphrased, totally awesome) power:

at will immediate reaction (when picked up)
The creature picking up the cat takes 1d10+2 damage and drops the cat. The cat shifts 3 squares.


Anyway, my point about the lack of housecat rules in the MM wasn't meant to indicate that housecats can't be in the game because they aren't statted. I just meant that claiming that their (unoffical) stats let them do crazy good things (like kill legion devils) is possibly an effect of the stats being a little too good and not entirely the fault of the minion rules.

 

[robertliguori]

Why is there a low-level wizard facing down a high-level Legion Devil?

This fails to take into account the zen of minions.

-O

The high-level team picked one of the many class-leveled NPCs out of the world and brought him along, knowing that he will quickly master the arcane secrets of enhanced blasting after dicing up a few Legion Devils.

Look, you can't have it both ways. Either we follow the book, and legion devils exist solely as challenges and not as setting elements, or they do exist as setting elements, and we need a separate adjudication method (probably the DM wings it, and problems are caused when the moral equivalent of the Cloud of Daggers is thrown at one of them and it fails in one case and works in the other).

So, if minions are not minions when interacting with house cats, then we're essentially playing two games; the combat minigame, which bears only passing resemblance to the game world, and the actual game, in which things happen according to the other system. I say that if it's important to you that minions not pop when hit with one point of damage from a no-miss source of damage, then the rules should reflect this.

Here, let's accelerate the level curve; all characters have DR equal to half their level, and all characters deal bonus damage on all attacks equal to half their level. Problem solved. We even get an increase of the all-important feeling of progress as your characters level, at the cost of under-level monsters being slightly easier and above-level monsters being slightly harder.

 

[Obryn]

The high-level team picked one of the many class-leveled NPCs out of the world and brought him along, knowing that he will quickly master the arcane secrets of enhanced blasting after dicing up a few Legion Devils.

"Look, I can invent corner cases that shouldn't ever happen in a game controlled by a thinking DM to make rules look broken!"

Look, you can't have it both ways. Either we follow the book, and legion devils exist solely as challenges and not as setting elements, or they do exist as setting elements, and we need a separate adjudication method (probably the DM wings it, and problems are caused when the moral equivalent of the Cloud of Daggers is thrown at one of them and it fails in one case and works in the other).

You must have a different book.

As I've said repeatedly, there's a zen to minions. They're a narrativist/gamist structure, not a simulationist one. You're trying to make them fit into a simulationist framework where, of course, they no longer make sense. (Much like action points or any other metagame mechanic.) I think you know that, and I'm really puzzled why you're still on this topic.

The game term "minion" is meaningless outside of combat with the PCs. There is no such thing as a "hit point" in the game world. The fact that minions have 1 hp is descriptive of nothing other than their interactions with PCs in combat - namely that they fall down when hit.

So, if minions are not minions when interacting with house cats, then we're essentially playing two games; the combat minigame, which bears only passing resemblance to the game world, and the actual game, in which things happen according to the other system. I say that if it's important to you that minions not pop when hit with one point of damage from a no-miss source of damage, then the rules should reflect this.

I think that's somewhat similar to what I'm saying. There's the combat rules - which only reflect what happens when the PCs are fighting things - and the other rules, which is basically when anything else in the world is fighting anything else.

Those other rules are very explicitly spelled out in the DMG. They amount to "don't roll dice for that."

Again, I think you know this about 4e. It is different than 3e. If you try to understand it within the gamist/narrativist structure of 4e, it makes perfect sense. If you try to understand it under a simulationist structure, you get ... well, your posts.

-O